CF Benchmarks BRTI Explained: How Bitcoin's Reference Price Is Set

BRTI is the CME CF Bitcoin Real Time Index: a bitcoin price in US dollars that CF Benchmarks calculates from the order books of several large exchanges, at an interval its index page gives as once per 200 milliseconds. It is a reference price that other products read, not a place where you can buy bitcoin. This guide explains who builds it, how it works, how it differs from the once-a-day rates, and why your exchange still charges its own price.

What is CF Benchmarks?

CF Benchmarks is an index provider. Its own site calls it "the world's first and leading digital asset index provider," and says it was born out of the Crypto Facilities Multilateral Trading Facility in 2016. It states that it is a member of the Crypto Facilities group of companies, which is in turn a member of the Payward, Inc. group. Payward operates the Kraken exchange, so CF Benchmarks is a Kraken-group company, and Kraken is listed on the site as a data source for some of its indices. CF Benchmarks says it is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (register number 847100). Its BRTI is administered under the UK Benchmarks Regulation.

Several of its indices carry the CME name; the BRR, covered below, is the one CF Benchmarks says settles the Bitcoin-USD derivatives complex listed by CME Group.

What is the BRTI?

The CME CF Bitcoin Real Time Index is described on its CF Benchmarks page as a benchmark that "aggregates order data from Bitcoin-USD markets operated by major cryptocurrency exchanges" that meet the CME CF Constituent Exchange Criteria. The page gives its rate as once per 200 milliseconds. A CF Benchmarks article says the methodology guide has set the calculation time at every 200 milliseconds since May 2026, and that a client can set a parameter to receive it every second instead. The index page also says "Calculated every second", which sits beside the 200 millisecond figure without explaining it; the article's account is the more specific, and the page's own publish-frequency field is blank.

The index page also says the BRTI is the settlement price input for event contracts and prediction markets offered by Kalshi, CME Group and ForecastEX.

How the BRTI is calculated, in plain words

The BRTI looks at what people are offering to buy and sell, not at what has traded. CF Benchmarks says the index "consolidates the order books" of its constituent exchanges, which means it merges their lists of bids and asks into one combined book. Three safeguards, as CF Benchmarks describes them:

• The size counted at any single price level of the combined book is capped.
• An exchange is left out of a calculation if its mid-price strays more than 5% from the median of the constituents' mid-prices. It rejoins once the gap is below 2.5%. Each exclusion is reported to the Oversight Committee.
• An exchange is also left out if its order book was retrieved more than 10 seconds before the calculation time.

The exact weighting formula is set out in CF Benchmarks' methodology guide and is not restated here, because it could not be checked line by line for this article. If you need it for a contract or a compliance file, read the guide itself.

Which exchanges feed the BRTI?

As of Constituent Exchanges List version 13.7 (24 August 2026), the BRTI's constituents are Bitstamp, Bullish Exchange, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Gemini, Kraken and LMAX Digital. CF Benchmarks says the list "changes through a published process," and that itBit was suspended on 27 July 2026. Exchanges are admitted only if they meet published criteria. The list can change again, so check CF Benchmarks' current document before relying on it. For how these platforms compare as places to buy, see the exchange reviews.

BRTI vs BRR vs BRRNY

The BRTI is the live index. The reference rates are once-a-day cousins built from executed trades instead of order books.

CF Benchmarks says the BRR "settles the Bitcoin-USD derivatives complex listed by CME Group," and a Bitwise prospectus describes the BRR as the underlying rate for settling CME bitcoin futures contracts. So the once-a-day BRR, not the BRTI, is the answer to "what settles CME bitcoin futures."

The BRRNY uses the same method as the BRR with a New York clock. CF Benchmarks describes it as observing trades during a one-hour window from 15:00 to 16:00 New York time, split into twelve five-minute slices. A volume-weighted median is taken for each slice, and the index is the average of the twelve medians.

Which spot bitcoin ETFs use a CF Benchmarks rate?

Two fund filings name the BRRNY. The Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) states that it will "establish its net asset value (NAV) by reference to the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate - New York Variant." The ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) said in its registration statement that it valued bitcoin using the same rate, calculated as of 4:00 p.m. Eastern time, but its fund page now says that since August 27, 2026 it calculates its NAV using the FTSE Bitcoin Index instead. Both filings are from 2023 and 2024, and other funds' current prospectuses were not checked for this article, so this is not a complete list. Each fund's latest prospectus says which rate it uses today. For how a fund's share price relates to its net asset value, see the spot ETF glossary entry.

Index versus one exchange's quote

An exchange quote is one venue's own order book: the best price someone there will pay or accept at that moment. An index is a calculation over several venues. CF Benchmarks says the BRTI "consolidates the order books" of its constituent exchanges, and says a venue whose mid-price strays more than 5% from the median of the constituents' mid-prices is excluded from that calculation. CF Benchmarks' February 2024 suitability analysis of the BRRNY describes a different safeguard for the daily rate: it states that the index value "is determined from the arithmetic mean of the volume-weighted medians," and that transactions from a constituent exchange whose median price deviates by more than 10% from the volume-weighted median of the other exchanges' transactions are excluded. The practical effect for a reader is that an index figure and a single exchange's screen price will rarely match to the cent. The index describes a blend of markets, while the quote on your exchange is the price at that one venue, before its fees.

How an exchange qualifies and how oversight works

The BRTI and the BRR both say they aggregate data from exchanges "that conform to the CME CF Constituent Exchange Criteria." CF Benchmarks' February 2024 suitability analysis of the BRRNY quotes two of those requirements from the criteria document: that the venue "has policies to ensure fair and transparent market conditions at all times," and that it has "processes in place to identify and impede illegal, unfair or manipulative trading practices." The full criteria are a separate PDF that CF Benchmarks lists under Documentation on each index page, and this article does not restate them.

The same Documentation sections list a CME CF Oversight Committee, with a charter and meeting minutes. The BRRNY page groups 30 documents under the Oversight Committee: the charter, a benchmark statement, a conflicts of interest policy and 27 sets of meeting minutes, running from September 2017 to November 2025. The suitability analysis says the deliberations of its oversight organs take place in regular meetings and that minutes are published. CF Benchmarks also says that each exclusion of an exchange from a BRTI calculation is reported to the Oversight Committee, and the suitability analysis says that, as a regulated benchmark administrator, it is subject to supervision by the UK FCA.

Where the rates are published

Each rate has its own page on cfbenchmarks.com. The BRR page says it has been calculated every day since its launch on 14 November 2016, and the BRRNY page gives its launch date as 28 February 2022. Both describe themselves as once-a-day benchmark index prices. The BRTI page, as covered above, gives the live interval. The index pages also carry the methodology documents, the constituent criteria and the committee records, so the primary documents sit beside the figures.

What a reader can do with the BRTI

The figure is a yardstick, not a recommendation. Three uses fit what the sources above establish:

• Compare an exchange's quote with the index at the same moment. A gap is expected, since the index blends venues and the exchange adds its own spread and fees.
• When reading a fund's prospectus, check which rate it uses to set its net asset value. Some name the BRRNY, and one fund page now names a different index, as described above.
• When a contract or product says it settles on a CF Benchmarks rate, check which one. The BRR, BRRNY and BRTI are different rates with different clocks and inputs.

Can you buy bitcoin at the BRTI price?

No. The BRTI is a calculation, not an order book you can trade against. When you buy on an exchange you pay that exchange's price plus fees. That gap is the spread, and a large market order can move through several price levels, which is slippage.

The BTC converter shows a bitcoin amount in your currency, and the price history tool shows how the price has moved. The guide to trading crypto covers placing an order, and what is bitcoin is the place to start if the basics are new.